My Father’s Orchards
Few historical novels have touched on the long trauma of the Romanian people, from the violent aftermath of the Russian Revolution in 1917, to German, then Russian domination, followed by the Ceaușescu dictatorship, brutal by even Soviet standards and eagerly supported by neighborhood spies and enforcers. My Father’s Orchards crafts a complex generational journey constantly returning to beloved, once-lush fruit orchards.
Domnica Radulescu’s novel opens after World War II with Florian Angelescu’s widowed mother searching for roots to feed her starving children, to 2015, when his granddaughter Corina leaves her family and self-exile in America to uncover her family’s tortured history and finds more searing unknowns and connections than she ever suspected.
The language throughout is powerful, deeply evocative and original, from a child’s view of Russian’s “globs of consonants” to the “viscous gel” of time,” and the family’s shared “hallucinations of normality.”
The novel’s style and structure do pose challenges for readers. Dialogue is spare, creating long blocks of text with limited sense of individual voices. Dramatic events are remembered and reported differently— “reality” is mutable. A child mourned as dead may have assumed other identities. Finally, the elliptical narrative structure means that the first shock of a horrific event is blunted in repeated retellings and qualifications. Despite patches of joy, and fierce love and devotion, the reader may be exhausted by trauma—and that may be precisely Radulescu’s purpose, to re-create generational pain and the iron will of endurance, invention, and connection despite all odds.
